


Silence is Golden

by fifteenstitches



Category: Psychoville
Genre: Character Study, Childhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-30 01:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fifteenstitches/pseuds/fifteenstitches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At seven years old, Jeremy has seen five different psychologists, been to six therapy groups and had numerous hospital tests. There’s nothing wrong with him. Jeremy himself is well aware of this.</p><p>He still hasn’t said a word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence is Golden

Grey is the colour that stands out, a heavy rain-soaked grey that seeps through clothes and hangs over the proceedings like a dull cloud. The air is thick with moisture and the details of heaped earth and grass are somehow sharper and more defined. Four-year-old Jeremy’s in Wellingtons and a Mac, his hair spiked with rain, his damp little hand holding onto the pocket of his mother’s suede coat.

The vicar’s voice is swallowed in tones of grey. He’s been told to keep still and be patient but Jeremy’s attention is wandering. There are worms in the freshly dug earth pile beside the grave. He can see them wriggling about, revelling in the damp soil, and the urge to investigate is steadily growing. His mother is evidently aware of this because suddenly she takes his small hand in hers in what Jeremy assumes is an instruction to stay still. He sighs and looks down at his fidgeting boots.

After an indeterminate amount of time, which seems to Jeremy to last forever, the huddled semi-circle of relatives begins to disperse. Jeremy looks up at his mother with his mouth open, wanting to be let go to explore, but her gaze is fixed on the earth-scattered coffin and she doesn’t look down. Bored, frustrated, Jeremy silently appeals to the guests now shuffling respectfully amongst the headstones. No help is forthcoming. A few sad smiles are pointed his way, which only exasperate him further.

Laughter suddenly cuts the air, a sharp clear sound, offensive in its expression of joy. To Jeremy it’s a beacon of hope. He looks around eagerly, swinging on his mother’s arm to see past the slow-shuffling crowd of anorak-clad adults. Around him, Jeremy senses a change in the atmosphere. People mutter, their murmurs of generic sympathies turning to disapproving speculation. The two occurrences seem to Jeremy to be unrelated. He strains against his mother’s determined grip to see the source of the laugh, but all he can make out is the tail of a bright blue coat hidden behind a faceless adult, and one small arm swinging carelessly by its side.

*

‘So, you don’t talk.’

Jeremy shakes his head, his little wire glasses wobbling slightly.

‘At all?’

Again.

‘Has it always been like this?’

Jeremy shrugs, his face indifferent. He’s a bit confused as to how this is going to work and wonders if his mother had really thought her idea through. As he understood it, a session with a child psychologist generally required some kind of input from both parties.

‘Do you have another way of communicating with people?’

Jeremy shrugs again and points to the pot of pens on the desk in front of him. The man opposite reaches into a drawer and presents him with a pen and a plain pad of paper.

‘Why don’t you show me?’

Jeremy sighs and glances solemnly at the man before his attention wanders to the window on the right-hand side of the office. From his low view-point Jeremy can just make out the tops of trees against a white sky.

‘Jeremy? What can you see?’

Pen to paper, black on white. The sweep of the ink moves smoothly over the page. Jeremy draws quietly for three and a half minutes before he sets the pen down and shows the man.

‘Oh, that’s nice, Jeremy. What is it?’

Jeremy is aware that sometimes adults can be really stupid. He thinks the reason for this might be that they always assume everything has to be more complicated than it is.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to show me?’

Jeremy shrugs, his fidgeting betraying his impatience. The clock on the wall behind the man’s head seems to be moving at half the usual speed.

‘Okay then, how about you pop outside and just tell your mum to come in and see me for a second?’

Jeremy gives the man a nod and a smile, his relief at being allowed to escape overcoming his irritation at being continually sent to these officious-sounding men with officious-sounding qualifications. He jumps down from the chair, leaving the page of perfect circles behind on the man’s desk.

*

A boy in Jeremy’s class has the same bag as him and when he gets home from school one afternoon he finds he’s taken the wrong one by mistake. His mother takes it from him and tells him it doesn’t matter and he can take it in tomorrow, but her tone is tired and snappish and he sees her roll her eyes as she turns away. Jeremy loves his mum, but occasionally he feels a flash of anguish which, because he doesn’t understand guilt, he mistakes for hatred. Jeremy knows that his silence is part of the reason his mum is sometimes sad. He’s sorry about it and wishes he could help, but he can’t think what he would say.

*

Grey is the colour that stands out. Jeremy’s back at the funeral. The familiar weight of ignorance and frustration is with him even when he’s dreaming. The pile of earth beside the empty hole seems taller than he remembers. The clouds are gathering – Jeremy looks up as rain starts to fall, quickly thickening the air with water and turning even the green of the grass to a dull grey. Mud swills round his Wellington-clad feet, and beside him his mother stands stock-still, as colourless as one of the stone angels etched on his father’s headstone. Darkness bleeds slowly into the picture. Jeremy tries to get away but his mother’s grip on his hand is firm, and as much as he struggles there is no breaking free. He looks around desperately, but the rain seems to have slowed him down and he is unable to do more than turn his head and shout silently into the storm.

When he hears it, the laughter touches his heart and the storm dissolves. Jeremy is suddenly free to move, and without any thought or control he races eagerly in the direction of the flash of blue. His boots slip and slide and he wishes he could call out to the boy, but it turns out he doesn’t need to because without any prompting the figure in the blue anorak turns to meet him.

Jeremy wakes up with a smile on his face and a warm feeling in his stomach. His sheets are tangled and his duvet is on the floor, kicked off at some point in the night by panicked feet, but there’s sunlight streaming through the crack in the curtains and for the moment, Jeremy feels safe and happy.

When he gets up he realises he cannot for the life of him remember what the boy in his dream looked like.

*

‘What have you been up to this week?’

Jeremy shrugs and looks up from the desk to stare at the man. He can hardly believe he is still made to come to these things. This is the fifth session – the tenth week. Five hours he has sat in this room, listening to a man ask questions he had no interest in answering. He doesn’t like it. Being in this room makes him feel odd, like there’s something wrong with him, which there isn’t.

‘Here. Would you mind showing me?’

A sheet of paper is once again thrust in his direction. Jeremy looks at it without moving to take the offered pen. Since the first session the man had started bringing different colours, a whole pot of rainbow Crayolas placed within Jeremy’s reach. Thoughtfully, he reaches for the blue and begins drawing, precise lines, mapping out a rectangle for the boy’s top, taking a red to draw legs that end in boots. There isn’t a skin colour so Jeremy uses black to outline hands and a head. He can’t remember what colour hair the boy in his dream had, but the picture looks funny without so he adds short waves of yellow, being careful not to smudge the black.

‘Aren’t you going to give him a face?’

Jeremy shakes his head and turns the picture round for the man to look at. He wants the boy to have a face, but if he tries to make one up he’ll always think of the fake one and his dream will be lost.

‘Is this someone at school?’

Jeremy shakes his head and reaches for the paper, taking a grey felt-tip and enclosing the picture in a thought bubble.

‘Oh...’ The man’s voice is hesitant but gentle. ‘Jeremy, is this your dad?’

He feels himself freeze for a moment, then he’s violently shaking his head, trying and failing to understand what brought the man to that conclusion.

‘Alright, Jeremy, it’s alright. Maybe it would be good for you to talk about it.’

Jeremy is panicked and confused as to how that would even work when the whole reason he has to come here is that he doesn’t speak, won’t speak, whichever one it turns out to be. He feels his cheeks heat up and looks away, embarrassed, his eyes prickling with anxious tears.

*

There are toast crumbs in the butter. They speckle together at the edges of the tub, black dust smeared into the surface. It is wholly unappetising and Jeremy is careful to go around the crumbs with his knife and take his butter from underneath the offending area, leaving an overhang of volcanic butter jutting into space. It’s unclear who left the crumbs there – his mother, the messier of the two of them (‘organised chaos’, she says) prefers margarine over butter, while Jeremy is meticulously tidy and would be more likely to notice any stray crumbs. He ponders this while he eats. His mum’s at work – she’s a part-time TA at Jeremy’s old nursery – and he has around twenty minutes before Ben and Ben’s Mum arrive to pick him up for school.

At seven years old, Jeremy has seen five different psychologists, been to six therapy groups and had numerous hospital tests. There’s nothing wrong with him. Jeremy himself is well aware of this.

He still hasn’t said a word.

*

The boys at school – Jeremy would never play with girls – are all extremely noisy. As he gets older, Jeremy can feel himself fade into the background as the air is filled with shouts and laughter, not conversation so much as declaring thoughts into the air for whoever happened to hear. At break-times, his group of friends have taken to chucking a ball around in a made-up game which inevitably ends in someone getting hit in the face. It’s fun at first, but after a while Jeremy notices that while other kids are getting the ball hurled at them at an alarming frequency, he is almost ignored. It’s not that they try to exclude him exactly, it’s just that in all the shouting, the jumping and yelling for attention, quiet little Jeremy disappears into the background. He does mind a bit, and part of him wishes he could just shake himself out of it and join in, but he likes being an observer too much to become involved in the sweaty, dusty turmoil of childhood.

The boy in blue and red is a frequent visitor to his dreams. Jeremy knows his face now, or rather (because dreams are mostly felt, not seen) he recognises that feeling of warmth and contentment that he rarely feels in real life. His mother is surprised at Jeremy’s sudden willingness to go to bed early. Jeremy hears her walk past the door and pause, suspicious, listening for any sign that he’s still awake. It makes him smile and he’s vaguely aware that part of the fun lies in keeping his dreams a secret. He can never remember the boy’s face, but it doesn’t matter – while he’s dreaming he has a friend who is always there, whose mere presence is enough to soak up all Jeremy’s anxiety. All the worried thoughts and feelings of guilt that trouble him during the day vanish when the boy appears, and it’s like a breath of fresh air, or like the care-free laughter of a child who is innocent of their darker surroundings. In the silence of Jeremy’s life, it’s like a song.

*

When he’s eight years old, Jeremy wins the Junior Maths Challenge for his school and his picture is put in the local paper. His mother cuts it out and pins the short article on the kitchen notice board with all of his (perfect) report cards, beaming at him whenever he enters the room. He hears her on the phone to his grandparents that evening relating the news and feels a thrill of happiness at her obvious pride and love. It’s not the first time he’s won something like this, and if he’s honest he would have welcomed more of a challenge, but at moments like this Jeremy doesn’t care about school, doesn’t care about the perfect grades or the pile of A-level books in his room or the way his classmates have mostly completely forgotten to talk to him now – everything else pales into insignificance when his mother smiles and spins him around in the air and declares that they’ll have cake for tea to celebrate. The evening passes in a contented glow of pride and contentment and when Jeremy falls asleep that night the boy in blue barely crosses his mind.

*

There’s a gradually lightening sky and Jeremy stands on flat grass that stretches infinitely ahead. It’s familiar and strange at the same time and the original comfort that Jeremy felt is dying away as he feels the absence of something important. It creeps up on him as the ground continues to spread outwards, the horizon disappearing almost completely but at the same time continuing to expand. He’s aware that something needs to anchor him to the ground or else he’ll fall off into this never-ending void of grass and space and pure white sky. Where is he? The moment the words enter his head he sees him, the boy, slightly ahead and moving away, not walking exactly but slipping in and out of focus as though about to disappear. This terrifies Jeremy. His surroundings are stretching and shifting and Jeremy can’t see, the boy has gone and everything is white and there’s silence filling his ears and nose and mouth until –

For no discernable reason, it all stops. The figure of the boy - blue top, red trousers, hands no more than shapes childishly outlined in black pen – is visible. He’s right here, facing away with his back turned. Is it him? Jeremy could reach out and tap him on the shoulder, but he doesn’t. He faintly acknowledges that that the boy’s presence should be a good thing. He should be reassured. It should make him feel safe, and happy, and warm.

Jeremy is suddenly absolutely positive that he _doesn’t want the boy to turn around._

Not daring to breathe, Jeremy slowly, carefully, takes a step back. The boy knows he’s there. Jeremy sees the blond head tilt slightly, sees one of the hands move in a casual swinging movement by his side. He can’t remember the boy’s face. Jeremy takes another step back, faster now, still pausing so as not to get the boy’s attention but at the same time ready to turn and run. It’s hardly worth it now. The back of his head doesn’t change, but Jeremy can feel the awareness coming off him and knows he’s listening. He can hear him breathing. The one time Jeremy has to be quiet, and he’s not quiet enough.

Stumbling now, one foot behind the other, knowing his cover is broken but still clinging to the chance that he can get away. Jeremy is still vaguely aware that he’s dreaming but it’s at the very back of his mind and he has no control over either the events or the overwhelming terror that’s sweeping over him. He sees the boy, and despite the fact Jeremy is moving backwards as fast as he can, there’s no distance between the two of them, and as he starts to turn round Jeremy is paralysed in silent fear and can only watch as his friend grins malevolently at him with a mouth full of pointed teeth.

*

Jeremy jolts awake and for the first few minutes he can’t remember where he is. He’s still half dreaming and everywhere he looks the face, the so familiar face of the boy is burnt onto the inside of his eyelids. He’s shivering and his pillow is wet with frightened tears. His mattress is damp too and somewhere in this mess of emotions he feels embarrassed but mostly he knows that he can’t stay in this room, can’t stay alone in the dark tonight. He gets up and stumbles to the door, hardly aware of where his feet are taking him until he trips and falls, and stays lying on the floor, curled up into a shaking ball because the place where he’s fallen is right below the mirror. He can’t look in the mirror. Jeremy knows what he’ll see.

His mother comes rushing in some minutes later to find what’s causing the whimpering she could hear from across the hall. She’s so shocked she can’t do anything but get her son to his feet and just hug him, just hold him in her arms until the tears stop and he stops shaking. His face is a mess of misery and worry buried in her pyjamas. His hands cling to her as they haven’t for six years.

Jeremy’s first words, choked and desperate, are ‘I had a bad dream.’

**Author's Note:**

> this was going to have three parts but i'm not feeling it so yeah 
> 
> maybe one day, who knows


End file.
